The utterance
harks back to the golden age; the gesture is trumped up by
the passion of the hour, or dictated by the master of the
hula, to whom the real meaning of the old bards is ofttimes a
sealed casket.
Whatever indelicacy attaches in modern times to some of the
gestures and contortions of the hula dancers, the old-time
hula songs in large measure were untainted with grossness. If
there ever were a Polynesian Arcadia, and if it were possible
for true reports of the doings and sayings of the Polynesians
to reach us from that happy land--reports of their joys and
sorrows, their love-makings and their jealousies, their
family spats and reconciliations, their worship of beauty and
of the gods and goddesses who walked in the garden of
beauty--we may say, I think, that such a report would be in
substantial agreement with the report that is here offered;
but, if one's virtue will not endure the love-making of
Arcadia, let him banish the myth from his imagination and hie
to a convent or a nunnery.

If this book does nothing more than prove that savages are
only children of a younger growth than ourselves, that what
we find them to have been we ourselves--in our
ancestors--once were, the labor of making it will have been
not in vain'.

For an account of the first hula we may look to the story of
Pele. On one occasion that goddess begged her sisters to
dance and sing before her, but they all excused themselves,
saying they did not know the art. At that moment in came
little Hiiaka, the youngest and the favorite. Unknown to her
sisters, the little maiden had practised the dance under the
tuition of her friend, the beautiful but ill-fated Hopoe.
When banteringly invited to dance, to the surprise of all,
Hiiaka modestly complied. The wave-beaten sand-beach was her
floor, the open air her hall; Feet and hands and swaying form
kept time to her improvisation:

Look, Puna is a-dance in the wind;
The palm groves of Kea-au shaken.
Haena and the woman Hopoe dance and sing
On the beach Nana-huki,